How Do You Spot a Great Founder Before the Metrics Show It?

Forget the pitch deck. Watch what a founder does at 8:30 AM when a staff member is delayed.

At Collective Future last week, the founder of PopUp Bagels and CF co-host Adam Goldberg graciously supplied the crowd with bagels. Literally, Adam himself was serving schmear.

It took me back to Saturdays growing up, driving store to store with my father. Employee doesn’t show? No problem. The founder and his daughter were there to fill in.

I wrapped gifts, cleaned the stockroom, and helped customers try on shoes. We’d watch customers light up or walk out empty-handed, delighted or disappointed. Clock which managers were cutting corners and who just didn’t cut it.

I learned there is no substitute for firsthand observation. C-suites need to leave the ivory tower, or they risk getting too removed from the customer to stay empathetic.

The founders I’m excited to back all operate like this:

🥯 Bias for action. Things go sideways? Stand and serve.

🥯 Obsessed with the customer experience. Quality bar doesn’t lower at scale.

🥯 Watch faces, not dashboards. You’ll see if you have product-market fit when the customer takes their first bite. (Or gets their first report, clicks their first button… whatever your special ‘magic moment.’)

🥯 Won’t ship without the schmear. Ship rough, ship fast, but never ship without the thing that makes the product yours.

When you’re running a team on a lean burn, you’re never going to have as many hands as you need. To be a founder is to problem-solve on the go, and be energized from it. It’s not glamorous. Most of it isn’t sophisticated. Just stubborn persistence and a refusal to let standards slip.

Product formulas and code are replicable, but ‘schmear’ and consistency compound!